16th March 2022

Yesterday flicked past, it was the Ides of March of course and the Smithsonian Magazine came up with a little story to fit the bill.  Recently in Japan a stone called 'The killing Stone' cracked in two and if legend is right the spirit of the nine tailed fox/woman killer is let loose.  Though someone did say after looking at the year 2022, she probably fled to another stone in dismay.  There are of course more down to earth explanation for this volcanic rock splitting in two - rain had got into the cracks and split it open.   You will be pleased to know that she was killed by a 12th century warrior.

So we still sit on the edge of the cliff with millions of people fleeing Ukraine (and Russia) and a person who likes to think of himself as a demigod still in power.  So many brave acts, people from other parts of the world making the journey into the territories of war to rescue loved ones.  It is not going right for Putin, a global revolt at his nastiness is showing that war is a weapon no longer needed, but I am sad for the Russian people having to go through all this at the behest of a crew of criminal gangsters, it does not matter they call themselves generals and politicians.  The evil of greed writ large, and territorial lines drawn.

On the 15th March 1917 The Russian Czar abdicated, I wonder if that date figures in Putin's reasoning? There is a painting of the Bolsheviks burning a portrait of the Czar, which shows that craziness of the mob as they overthrow the regime.

Czar Nicholas II of Russia signs his abdication papers, ending a 304-year-old royal dynasty and ushering in Bolshevik rule. He and his family are taken captive and, in July 1918, executed before a firing squad.

History has a funny way of taking you by the throat and leading you down rabbit holes.  This one Maiden Castle, or Mai-dun (great hill) One of the largest Iron Age hillforts in Europe, but situated in Dorset.  It has scarred the landscape with its human made banks and ditches.  It is formidable but its long history starts way back in the Neolithic with a cursus (a banked long length with external ditches, once thought of as Roman race course) over the centuries it developed into a large settlement with strong fortifications.  The Romans came along in AD 43 and maybe they destroyed it, evidence of fire and death around that period and it declined, though there was a small Romano-Celtic temple built there.

Aerial Photo 1935

Two thousand years it has stood there, a graceful landscape art dug out by hundreds of people all those years ago, now empty and deserted.

The Celts - 1980  BBC programme